[IH8Rice]

good reminder for password protecting your network.

In 2006, a Google engineer "working on an experimental WiFi project" wrote a piece of code for collecting "all categories of public broadcast WiFi data" -- basically, all information (known as "payload") downloaded and uploaded from an open / non-password protected network. That code -- by mistake, as VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace says -- wound up a year later into the software Google's Street View cars used to collect location-based data. ... The original intention, he said, was to obtain only SSID information and MAC addresses, but that just wasn't the case. .

Offering an open apology, he reassured that this affected only open networks and, given the cars being "constantly on the move," only fragments of data were collected -- fragments that he says were never looked at or even noticed until the audit

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/14/street-view-cars-mistakenly-nabs-personal-data-over-wifi-says-g/
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html

 

[Secret Squirrel]

I bet all they got were some kiddie porn pictures (prolly what the auditors found...) and a few bank accounts that had less than $300 bucks in 'em....

Still...